B. Eugene B.

Some may remember when they aired the show, Scared Straight, on prime-time national television in the late 1970’s. I remember my parents having my brother and I watch it in our living room. At first Dave and I were horrified because of the build up to it and the fact our parents were so insistent that we watch it. Eventually, though, the horror turned to macabre fascination. My parents were good people, they talked to us about what we were seeing, and I am certain they had the most sincere intentions, but the social experiment that was being conducted didn’t accomplish what it had intended. I feel there was a whole generation of us who had been forced to watch Scared Straight and saw through the farce of hype that the media and that society was throwing at us. Many of us were, a few years later, equally fascinated as we watched the 1984 movie Suburbia. But this time it was our story, it was our message that was being told. That movie scared the adults and parents who watched i

My childhood was not normal. I had many unusual opportunities and life experiences; I grew up on a pseudo-ranch with a cow named hamburger and we lived in a caboose for part of the year. I was fortunate to have a loving family and I was given opportunities for which I am forever grateful. I was curious and sensitive to my own feelings and the feelings of others, a trait that is not common in all young boys. I may not have been the most well-behaved kid but I was careful to try and not hurt anyone, and when I did I felt awful about it and I made amends as best as I could. I was never afraid to tell the truth. This book is a testament to that. I can’t say it was easy - telling the truth never is - but I grew more confident each time I told a story that hurt me in the first telling. Each subsequent story, no matter how painful, became more and more important for me to tell. I didn’t write under an alias, a pen name, to hide my identity. I originally decided to do it because I d

Memories of my grandma and the smell of the soap in her bathroom. She had a collection of decorative soaps that she had displayed on the counter over the sink; shaped like flowers and clusters of grapes, small cakes with bright colors and floral perfumed scents. Later on, when my mom was a grandma, her bathroom was filled with rose scented soaps and lotions. It must be a grandma thing to fill the privy with fresh scented bath products.

Beginning to write can seem daunting at times. The process of deciding what to write about can cause a great deal of anxiety as you stare at the blank page or white screen. As it is also a very exciting prospect, having the opportunity to start and create something outside of your own self, finding the words to start can be difficult. One thing that I like to do is to write about how I am feeling, describing the anxiety and the discouragement, and forgetting that I am actually writing at all. I start to yell at the page, in angry exclamations, about how the experience scars me and makes me want to scream. Eventually I get to a point where I realize that I have cleared the block, unfrozen the stream, begun building the setting and have expressed myself without even realizing that I was doing it. Then I look around me, nervous that the others on the bus may think me weird for the contortions and scowls I have been throwing at the computer...

Just because I have written about my life, and my personal struggles with alcohol addiction, does not imply that I am an expert on addiction. I can tell you all you want to know about what impact alcohol had on my life but I can’t tell you what it is for you or your loved ones to suffer from addiction. Experts are available to help and I am not one. I would encourage you to seek help if you think you or a loved one needs it. I do hope that what I have written about will give you hope in the power of human kindness and hope in the miracle of redemption for those who reach out for help.

When I was young I was often angry. Angry about how I felt slighted, by one thing or another mostly. Angry about injustice. Angry that children didn’t have rights, that we could be conscripted to fight and die by a political system we didn’t have a voice in. This anger gave me strength and it gave me power. It drove me toward the political system, not away from it, and I determined at a young age that I would become the youngest and angriest president ever. The anger wasn’t directed toward any one person and it wasn’t driven by evil. It was anger directed toward enabling positive change in the world. Our country had just pulled out of Vietnam, Nixon had just resigned office, and no-one seemed to know what was next except the inevitable nuclear holocaust and societal collapse that so many people were prophesying. Into this mix I saw the world as a place that needed help. I lashed out and took swipes. At times I was taken down, “put in my place”, by adults who were less

After I finished B. Coming Burl, I was fortunate to have many people read it who had grown up with me and knew for themselves, or who had grown old with me telling them my stories of a misguided youth. Several of them reminded me about stories that I either (1) had to edit out during revisions, or (2) had forgotten to include. So now I have decided to share a few of these missing pieces - teasers for those who haven’t read it, and a bonus for those who have. One story was from way back in the mists of my youth, when I was about four years old. We would make periodic pilgrimages to Nogales, Mexico as a family to buy essentials. I have fond memories of the small family-owned grocery store where my dad would buy café combate in small burlap bags, which the owner would grind for us in the back of the store, filling the space with the most amazing smell of fresh coffee. We would buy salsa from the factory and my brothers would buy fireworks to blow things up when we got home. Th

It is hard to explain how I feel, now that I have found my calling. I remember when I was a little boy and my dad used to say how much he loved his work, how he was always excited about it, and how it didn’t feel like work to him. As I grew older I envied him, and anyone else who had that experience, because I didn’t share the sentiment for most of my adult life. Let me be clear, I never hated my job. I just didn’t feel like it was what I was supposed to be doing. I felt that there was something much more important that I should be doing with my life than working for someone else. And now, having finished my first book and being well on my way with writing my second, I am loving every moment of it. The most amazing thing about writing, for me, is that I can spin off on tangents and follow rabbit holes and when I am done, as long as I come back to somewhere near the surface where I started, no one knows that it wasn’t a perfectly orchestrated writing technique that I had plan

I have to pinch myself a lot lately. I have been a writer my entire life but only now am I writing with earnestness and purpose, like my life depended on it, and I love it. I want to sing out, “I want to be a paperback writer” because, all of the sudden, I am a paperback writer! And now, on top of that, I am blogging about it too! The reality is that I gained this new-found confidence when I finally became sober. When I was drinking and using drugs I was writing but I wasn’t able to keep my mind focused on what my calling was, I was too busy looking for the next fleeting high. Now that I am plunged into the depths of profound sobriety, my restless mind pounces on new ideas relentlessly. And, as one who was introduced as “my Grandson, the one with the vivid imagination”, I can’t help but see the world through a lens that is more convex than the concave glasses everyone else is peering through.

My routine is to write on the bus. I work in Seattle and live in Tacoma and so my writing salon is the Sound Transit bus, the 590. Both the north-bound (in the morning) and the south-bound (in the evening) is my literary capsule, driving through time and space while I am cocooned in my thoughts. I often write about people I see on the bus. If any of my characters seem familiar, and you take the 590, I may be writing about you. My inspiration often comes from seemingly inconsequential occurrences. As an example, seeing the rivulets of water tracing the glass on a rainy day, or overhearing a conversation between two people where one person says, in exasperation, “They can’t keep us in suspense like this!” From these small happenings I spin great tales in my head, with ideas cascading off of one another and building momentum until I spill over with excitement about the images that I conjure up with my vivid imagination. And then I get to my destination and I get off the bu

I began writing at a very young age and really never stopped. I wrote in journals, I wrote short stories, and I wrote poems. I also wrote a lot for work. That was an interesting oeuvre, to be honest, and one that might be of interest someday. The work-related writing included both highly technical instructions and also letters of apology to guests who felt slighted in some way during their stay with us at the hotel. Although most of this isn’t publicly available, I am certain that some of my responses to guests on TripAdvisor are still there. It took me fifty years but I recently finished my first book, a memoir, entitled “B. Coming Burl” and self published it using Kindle Direct Publishing. Even before I published it I began writing my second book, which I plan to finish this summer (2020). It is entitled “When I was a child I found the entrance to hell to be a real place”. Although this second book is fictional, it has a lot of me in it. Thank you for finding my blog.